Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2408.08886

The Oasis Project: UHI mitigation strategies applied to Parisian schoolyards

Ghid Karam·Martin Hendel·Bobée Cécilia·Berthe Alexandre·Bordin Patricia·Royon Laurent
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Paris is experimenting and implementing strategies to increase the capital's resilience and promote climate change adaptation. Major heatwaves have been hitting the French Capital lately (Bador et al., 2017) and have thus focused attention on UHI countermeasures, such as pavement-watering solutions and urban greening. The Oasis Project is one such strategy aiming to transform schoolyards into urban cool islands that would benefit surrounding neighborhoods and their inhabitants during heatwaves.The work presented here focuses on identifying high-priority schoolyards among the 670 city-owned schools. This is conducted using a GIS tool used to identify areas with high cooling potential, which would benefit most from UHI countermeasures. After extracting bare schoolyard from the facilities, we built a cooling indicator based on the ratio of high solar irradiance surface to the whole schoolyard area. We were thus able to identify 38 schoolyards with high cooling potential, 157 with medium cooling potential and 286 facilities with moderate cooling potential, out of the 670 facilities.The methodology can be applied to other cities, and therefore helps set up GIS tools that can provide municipalities with meaningful insight into their urban cooling strategy.

Explore related subjects

physics.ao-ph

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Ghid Karam, Martin Hendel, Bobée Cécilia, Berthe Alexandre, Bordin Patricia, Royon Laurent. 2024-08-05. The Oasis Project: UHI mitigation strategies applied to Parisian schoolyards. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08886

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Conservation Constraints and Distributed Advective Memory in a Reduced Model of Atlantic Overturning Hysteresis

Interbasin exchange through the Indo-Pacific gateway supplies salt to the Atlantic and is widely invoked as a control on the stability of the Atlantic overturning circulation. We ask whether that control can act on the equilibrium structure of a conceptual thermohaline model. A closed five-box model with an exact salt invariant is constructed, comprising North Atlantic, upper-limb, Indian, Pacific, and deep reservoirs, with the return flow split between a warm route through the Indian reservoir and a cold route, together with an Indonesian Throughflow branch and an Agulhas retroflection. Adding the steady-state budgets of the gateway reservoirs shows that every internal exchange cancels, so the salt they export to the Atlantic is fixed by the net Atlantic freshwater export alone. This holds independently of the warm-route fraction, the throughflow, the retroflection, and how the export is apportioned among gateway reservoirs; across a parameter sweep the largest departure is of order ten to the minus eleven. The gateway therefore enters as a purely additive forcing and cannot renormalize the salt-advection feedback. Replacing the discrete transit lag by a gamma memory kernel leaves the equilibria unchanged but yields a closed-form threshold for oscillatory instability depending only on kernel shape. Broad memory is strongly stabilizing, and a discrete lag is the least stable member of the family. Because the instantaneous feedback vanishes at the fold, oscillatory instability always precedes the saddle-node, over an interval widening more than tenfold as memory sharpens. Gateways therefore appear to act on transient rather than equilibrium dynamics

physics.ao-ph↗
arXiv2026

Forecasting threshold exceedance of atmospheric variables at a specific location

Accurate short-term forecasting of extreme weather events is important for early warning and risk mitigation. We compare two approaches for predicting site-specific threshold exceedances of weather variables: direct binary probabilistic models trained on thresholded outcomes and full-distribution parametric models trained on the continuous target. Using an analytically tractable Gaussian random-location model, in which the distribution is predictably shifted by the covariates, we quantify the consequences of the information loss induced by thresholding and derive the rare-event behavior of prediction errors and forecast skill. The analysis predicts an increasing relative advantage of the full-distribution approach as event probability decreases, because binarization progressively discards information contained in the continuous response. We then compare the two approaches to forecast wind speed and accumulated rainfall at various weather station sites over southeastern France using the same hybrid neural-network architecture. Although wind speed and rainfall depart from the toy-model assumptions, its main qualitative predictions are recovered for both variables: the relative advantage of distributional modeling increases toward rarer thresholds. This agreement further suggests that a substantial fraction of the forecastable signal associated with extreme events arises from predictable shifts in the conditional distribution. For the reasonably suitable parametric families examined, the results show limited sensitivity to the selected class of distribution. Overall, the results highlight the statistical advantage of training on continuous observations rather than on thresholded binary outcomes when forecasting rare threshold exceedances.

physics.ao-ph↗
arXiv2026

Blinded Evaluation of Oceanic Sound Source Locations via Sequential Bound Estimation

A non-linear, non-Bayesian method called sequential bound estimation (SBE) derived 100% confidence intervals of location (CIL) for 219 explosions in the ocean from measurements of their time differences of arrivals among five widely-spaced time-unsynchronized receivers on the ocean bottom. The explosion's locations were measured with the global positioning system. A blind evaluation revealed all 219 explosions were within their CIL. The probability this could happen by chance is $4 \times 10^{-116}$. The explosions were detonated in shallow water on the eastern continental shelf of the U.S. over the so-called New England Mud Patch.

physics.ao-ph↗